CC covered VW Syncros in June of 2012 before I espied this juicy example outside of a surf shop in Cannon Beach, Oregon last August. I’m a sucker for anything in orange and this Syncro was unabashedly orange. A 1986 Syncro road test in Car and Driver indicated that the 2.1 liter pushrod four could propel the 4000 lb (1800 kg) palace on wheels from zero to 60 mph (96 kph) in 18.3 seconds with a top speed of 79 mph (127 kph).

Synchro with chrome wheels

It is my understanding that Syncros were not made beyond 1991, so either this example has spent most of its life in a garage (research indicates that inertia is more common than motion with these things) or it has been recently restored. Syncros get a bad rap for reliability, while others state that with regular maintenance, Syncros will actually run. Just don’t drive too far from home. (And yet others take them globe-trotting under the most challenging conditions- Ed)

A Synchro at Cannon Beach Surf

As one reads further, “regular maintenance” turns out to be “replace the engine and drivetrain with Subaru components”.

This is the orange Westfalia camper that my friend and I picked up new at the Westfalia factory in Germany. We then proceeded to spend the next five months living out of the VW while filming in France, Spain, and Morocco. It was comfortable digs for two along with all of our camera equipment. Cabinet hinges and latches were prone to failure, and the van cried for a five-speed transmission. The gap between third and fourth meant screaming in third or lugging in fourth. Spain is a very mountainous country so this was a daily problem. But otherwise, not a bad way to live on the road.

45 Comments

You can have that color, Kevin. I have never refused to buy a car because of its color, but this one would make me think about it. Just because I occasionally eat Kraft Dinner doesn’t mean I want to drive it around.

Had a 56 Van with a 36 hp engine briefly. The only VWs I really had luck with were all air cooled beetles. When they got bigger all the engines seemed to have to really scream before the boxes would move much. I read about a van on the web that was named “the road cow” that had a toyota engine. I would like to have had that. Actually could get out of its own way and run on the interstate. Vw could have done that easier than the owners did. Probably still has the story on the web but I didn’t look recently. Gave up the idea.

While finding info on a 2c Toyota diesel I had I found a web article on one in a VW van and honestly why not, a 85hp diesel in a Kombi would be ideal they pull from idle and a little extra weight aids traction and still slow on hills, perfect.

What we used to do with my uncle’s VW van was let him start it, put it into gear, floor it, then walk up to it and get in, giving him a head start with the van empty. This kept it from rolling backwards under the weight of us four kids, weighing probably about 150 pounds total, which was too much for it. This was also necessary since we often had to get out and push it up hills, out of pot holes, and if there was an incline greater than 3 degrees.

We knew it had an engine in it because there was a loud groaning coming out from behind and the tail pipes would shake and blow some kind of smoke out of it, like there was some kind of movement within the van somewhere.

The Westphalia option was logical since most VW vans moved so slowly you could set up a campfire, eat and make s’mores before it was able to get into second gear. Us kids used to pop open the top, fold down the tables, and make the beds, forgetting the van was still moving.

Lets face it, if the Nazis depended upon VW vans to fight WWII, they’d still be pushing for the Polish border today, trying to get over the infamous Polish speed bumps as 82 year old soldiers. And blitzkrieg would have been renamed nichtkrieg.

In 1970 I learned how to drive in my dad’s 1961 Mercedes 190Db. Dad took me out to a hilly area so that I could learn how to drive the thing on hills. The secret was to gain as much speed going downhill as possible, and then downshift and floor the accelerator to get back up the hills, losing as little speed as possible, clattering all the way. Gads, that was a noisy yet anemic engine.

FWIW, the VW van owes a lot of its underpinnings to the VW Kubelwagen of WW2, that acquitted itself very well indeed, including on the Russian front. One could say that the Kubelwagen was a bus with a different body.

The reduction gears that gave the Kubelwagen its excellent gearing and high ground clearance were used in the bus for the same reasons.

As regards to the climbing ability of the VW buses of yore, even the very original 1950 bus with its Kubelwagen 1100cc 25 hp engine could start on and climb a 23% grade loaded to capacity. Yes, its 49 mph top speed was a bit modest, but for Europe in 1950, that wasn’t so bad.

A 1500/1600 cc gen1/gen2 bus had a top/cruising speed of 68 mph/71 mph. And the 2 liter later gen 2s and gen3 raised that to around 80. I once drove a 2 liter gen2 (1977 or so) and was pleasantly surprised at how reasonably well it accelerated. With proper rowing of the gears, it moved right along…no, it wasn’t a GTO….

A wasserboxer T3 will do about 85 mph or so.

But so much for the facts; let’s get back to chortling with the stereotypical, over-used, old-hat, so-predictable comments about how slow VW buses were.

Stripped of all the interior gear, my ’71 was light enough to be “tolerable” in the speed department, although I still did carefully plan merging into traffic. As the engine accumulated miles after a back yard rebuild, it gradually lost oomph, to he point where a trip to the NC mountains left it so winded I had to back up twice to tackle the final medium-steep driveway for the home at which we stayed.

But then, I never bought the thing because I wanted to get places fast…

My grandfather purchased a ’60 VW van new for a rural mail route. As one who let the engine lug around as he was accustomed to doing in Fords, it needed an overhaul at around 20,000 miles. This was well before my time, but this is what my father has always stated.

On a trip out west with my parents as a teenager, I remember getting behind a VW van going up some steep passes. It was going at nearly wide-open throttle (it sounded like a four-cylinder chain saw) and a very slow speed. We, in a 302 powered LTD Crown Victoria, had an engine speed just above idle. Different engineering for different audiences with different needs.

I always thought that you had to send a postcard if you wanted to pass someone in one of these.

That is until one day when I was passed by one on a two lane highway gracefully sweeping alongside a lake.

The speed limit was slow because of the continuous curve and the fog that would come in off the lake. It was a clear day, and I ever fearful for my driver’s license, had my cruise set for the posted limit. So I’m passed by two teens laughing as they revved that air cooled boxer to pass my 9C1 Caprice. It was probably the first pass in that VW’s life and it was certainly the last. For about five minutes down the road the van was on the shoulder with smoke billowing from the engine bay with the stranded teens looking confused and forlorn.

A very popular engine transplant into these is a turbodiesel 1Z or AAZ engine from a late 1990s Passat or Jetta. I know of two people who have done this conversion to their synchros.

My best friend while growing up had a VW bus – the biggest problem that they had with it was its tendency to almost get blown over while driving in rural Central WA (one can get some serious crosswinds in that area, especially down the Columbia River Gorge where the wind actually blew an entire freight train off of a bridge into the river back in the 1970s).

Roughly half of the Syncros still banging around my piece of Sierralandia have been given the Subaru conversion. Its sort of the VW version of ‘fixing’ the Jaguar with a 350SBC& TH400. The VW Vans offer one of the best total volume/wheelbase ratios of any vehicle ever made.

The eastern front of the Sierra here has the same powerful wind gusts. I can imagine something that light with its huge side profile I’ve seen triple trailers blown off the road in front of me on a bad day, and somewhat recently Union Pacific had a partial derailment of a train on the old Western Pacific route.

As for the Synchro… I once worked with a guy who saved his sheckles for a Westphalia optioned model. He wanted it to tour around with his middle-class trophy wife. But this was a good 25+ years ago when credit was less plentiful, the Deutschmark was strong and VW was charging premiums for their German quality. So husband and wife studied the order book to make the most reasoned choices on what would be their factory order. However, they came to disagree on one point. He wanted Synchro in case they ran into trouble on sand or snow. She wanted air for obvious reasons. But Synchro was a $3K option as was A/C and they couldn’t afford both at about $10K each in 2013 dollars.

So as anyone who’s married knows the wife won and the Westphalia was delivered with air.

Fast forward two years and the couple were on tour somewhere when the wife manages to get the van stuck. No matter what she tried she couldn’t rock the RWD VW out of the mess. Finally in frustration she turns to her husband and asks her what to do.

Have not seen a Westphalia Syncro van this model but Paul’s right these go ok on the flat, the previous air cooled vans with 2L or 1800 suitcase engines have adequate power too the Southern outlet from Hobart(tas) requires 3rd gear in a VW van on the climbs but 2nd is needed on the same hills in a splitscreen 1500, noone bought a Volks van if they were in a hurry anyway.

Of course (they made them and they were slow). The non-turbo diesel Vanagon/T3 really was underpowered. But it’s very easu to upgrade them with a turbo-diesel or even a modern TDI. I suspect almost all of them have been.

I hear you. And around town and nearby, that would work ok. But on American freeways, the diesel T3 really was seriously challenged.

My brother has one, and he drove it in its original non-turbo form for some time, including many trips to high altitudes in the Rockys. It would climb any mountain pass, but just very slowly. I would not have been happy to be stuck behind him on a mountain pass.

yes, 1.6td diesel in both the 14″ and 16″ syncros. Measurements refer to stock wheel size, the 16″ had additional body and suspension re-inforcements, and higher final drive ratios (front and rear). Higher as in 5.43 instead of 4.86 (there are more ratios).

I never had a problem with the power of VW Westfalia that we used in Spain and Morocco. I think that it was a 1.8. Of course, we didn’t have power steering, power brakes, a/c, or the other power robbing stuff. But the four-speed was woefully inadequate, as I mentioned. Give me another gear in between 3rd and 4th, but leave 4th at 1-to-1. No overdrive.

I personally have no experience with the featured vehicle, but when I did research on it, I was horrified by some of the comments that I read. But I’m sure that the orange paint and the polished aluminum wheels would go a long way to ameliorating any supposed cooling problems.

In the US, where much of our roads are relatively flat, the 4-speed in these vehicles would have been adequate. But Spain is a very mountainous country, second only to Switzerland as I recall. The big spread between 3rd and 4th was pronounced and onerous. I can’t remember how many miles I put on the ’74 (15,000?, maybe more) but another gear would have been much appreciated.

On the other hand, on a three week shooting trip to Spain in 1989, we rented a VW Golf 5-speed. No grunt-it was a carbed 1600 cc unit, but the 5-speed was delightful. We were shooting in one of the most mountainous areas of Spain. After 6000 miles, I came away thoroughly impressed.

Daily routine: up pre-dawn to shoot the sunrise; run like hell to our next shooting location, generally hours away; shoot in the warm (color temp) afternoon sun; catch a sunset. I had to drive my ass off. But the quick steering, perfectly spaced gearing, and able handling was great. Hard to believe that this car was related to my ’78 Rabbit.

VW buses weren’t exactly designed for US freeways in Iowa. They were originally and primarily designed for Europe, much of which is mountainous.

To the best of my knowledge, the gear spacing on the buses was the same as the VW sedans and such; only the final drive was changed to suit the power of the engine.

Given the extreme popularity of VWs of all sorts, including buses, in the Alpine regions, and how they were used since their very beginning to haul heavy loads of tourists around the Alps, I have never, ever heard anyone complain about the gap between 3rd and 4th on a VW aircooled gearbox; in the US or Europe. And I’ve drive all generations of them myself.

But you’re allowed your opinion, and I know you’re rarely short of them 🙂 It’s just the first I’ve ever heard this.

Update: Just checked; every rear engine VW from 1961 on all the way through the Vanagon had the following forward gear ratios: (1-4) 3.80; 2.05; 1.26; 0.82. The only exception is that buses prior to 1965 had a 1.21 3rd instead of that 1.26.

What did change was the final drive ratios, which was 4.375 for all Sedans, KG and Type 3s; dropping to 4.125 or 3.875 for the later ones (1500/1600)

Buses/transporters had a number of final drive ratios, that tended to become (numerically) lower in later years with more power.

But the effective and relative ratios of VW gearboxes from 1961 through the end of the rear-engine T3 Vanagon was always the same: 3.80, 2.06, 1.26 and 0.82; just as god intended them to be. Parts communality FTW!

As a final note: that space between 3rd (1.26) and 4th (0.89) is none too big. I have a hard time imagining splitting that gap with another gear.

About 20 years ago, I was visiting a customer in southern California, and after the meeting, six of us went out for lunch. Five of us climbed into the CEO’s Jaguar XJ, and the chief software developer told us to go ahead, he would catch up with us.

We’re now doing about 85 mph (137 kph) on the freeway, when I hear a horn sounding off. Imagine my surprise when I recognize the selfsame chief software developer at the wheel of an orange VW bus, passing us briskly on the right, with a silly grin on his face!

Man it kills me when there is an article about a vanagon and folk trot out stories about experiences with earlier VW vans.
Here i am 2 days ago, looking at my ’86 syncro (btw, westfalia, not westphalia) after using it quite hard on some rough and steep logging roads, somewhere on the west side of Vancouver Island. Abandoned logging road bridge over a very nice stream.

Zero-to-60 in 18 something seconds isn’t even that slow… well, OK, it is – it’s crazy slow – but it only seems that way compared to the 300HP plain jane family sedans that are currently the norm. Before V8s became commonplace, that would’ve been hot rod material, and even long afterwards most fullsize cars with sixes and smaller post-emissions V8s were no better. I think most people confuse the amount of right-pedal effort it takes to move a car with acceleration/output, and a 70-odd horsepower engine will do just fine banging off its redline all day provided it isn’t a total piece of crap.

Personally, I’d prefer a little more get up and go, but I could live with it… especially knowing that the vehicle could also function as a domicile and go nearly anywhere on earth. Up until a year and a half ago, I was driving a car that was only slightly faster than this (maybe capable of a ~16 second 0-60 run) and it was fine – just dull, and the seats didn’t even recline.

Found a nice video of a completely restored and rebuilt T3 Oettinger I mentioned above. You can have a good look at the engine. (running at the end)

Engine options were a 3.2 or a 3.7 ltr. 6 cylinder, 165 and 180 hp, both fuel injected.
Quote Wikipedia:
“The six-cylinder engine as used in the VW Oettinger WBX6 was developed by VW in conjunction with Oettinger for use in the T3. When VW abandoned the project Oettinger took the design, refined it and put it on the market. As such the six-cylinder shares many parts with the four-cylinder Wasserboxer.”